Digital Home Networking

Chapter 8

Service Management

8.1. Introduction

The home service (HS) management is composed of miscellaneous aspects. In a general way, it must enable the use of a service to authorized users. This includes configuration, the access to the service, and the management of on-going communications. For HSs, a main aim is to enable authorized users to access the service through the network, given that the user may be located in its own home or not. Moreover, the service can involve more than one user or a service can use an other user's resource. Thus, additional network communications may be required to index and to retrieve information (contact, content or other services). This chapter focuses on the network communication part of the service management.

This chapter falls into three main parts. Sections 8.2 and 8.3 present the basic elements: architecture elements positioning and communication protocol to manage communications. Then, three technical network structures for service management are described: the virtual private network (VPN) architecture, the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture, and the peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. While the first two technologies have been effectively deployed in the Feel@Home (F@H) project, the last one has been studied from a prospective point of view as an interesting alternative that might replace a more operator-focused solution such as IMS.

8.2. Service management basis

HSs are a specific set of services. Compared to classical operator ...